I had a really bad weekend associated with floppy drive failures. Either all my floppy disks or all my drives decided to jump the ship. Nothing worked! Worse, I could not buy any “new” floppy disk anywhere. Office Depot still stocks floppies but not in stores and you have to order online and wait. Neither Halted nor Weirdstuff had them as well. Seriously?

A major disaster! Something had to be done to make it future proof. So I went to research floppy drive replacement solutions. And this is what I found. There are several Floppy Disk Emulators on the market.

Here is the list and a little bit of research on every one of them. They do have major differences to be aware of.

EMUFDD– The first one I found. Italian made, intended to be used in industrial machinery. The device is extremely compatible, customizable, feature rich and according to the company, individually installed in each deployment. I bears a lot of interesting features such as Network option. Apart from the high price the device is not intended to be used by hobbyists.

Gotek– This one is by an Indian company. Very cheap and you can find it everywhere. It costs about $25 on eBay including shipment. However a major warning: they work by dividing the SD card in to 100 partitions, each size of a single floppy disk and multiplexing them to emulate a floppy disk. Because the partitions are formated with FAT12 the device is not usable for anything else than MS-DOS and Windows. Apparently revision F is capable of storing a single “bootable” or non-MS-DOS disk image. Also they have separate models for 720k, 1.2MB and 1.44MB. There is a whole army of Gotek clones.

IPCAS– This is another clone of Gotek, however worth separate mention and a warning, it costs $300 – ouch!

HxC – this one was found by claunia. As with most French stuff bit confusing because it has several web sites (onetwothree). The devices are manufactured in Poland by Lotharek. The price is around $150 and you can buy it on eBay. Feature wise may be the best of all, it definitely supports all the non-PC platforms and even very weird formats. The software naively supports conversion from the notorious IMD and TD0. For some people it will be appealing the HxC is an open source project and you can build it yourself. Certainly it helps to ensure longevity in case of the vendor going out of business. Definitely a winner here.

HxC USB Version – This is interesting variant that instead of SD card uses a wired USB connection to a host machine. The main drawback is that it is read only. However you can’t beat it’s $70 price. For this I could probably refit few of my machines and use it for boot only.

FlexiDrive – Made in Argentina. The manufacturer claims to support all floppy disk formats including 8″ disks. SD card or USB based. They are made for industrial machinery and customized firmware for different applications. Cost $385.

DTX200 – from Datex a French company. These are also made for industrial machinery. They maintain a large database of emulated floppy drive types. Interestingly they have video of MicroVAX using their emulator, certainly interesting from retrocomputing point of view! They also make MFM 2 CF hard disk emulator. The price is $495.

I have ordered two units for testing: HxC, SD revision F from eBay and Gotek Rev F from the manufacturer. I guess testing of the units will be subject of part 2 of this post. I’m planning to try to install some of the weirdest operating systems with wildest disk formats.

Also as a final note, for more modern computers with USB support there are some more mainstream options. I have used following two professionally:

Floppy Emulator in Pendrive / USB Stick. The best success I had so far was zMate pen drive from DaneElec which registers as a floppy drive with the system in addition to regular removable disks. I used it several times for booting, loading Windows storage drivers or saving BIOS diagnostic logs from servers without FDD.

Lantronix Spider, which allows you to mount a virtual floppy disk or cdrom image from the viewer machine or SMB share, just as you would using VMware or VirtualBox. Pretty cool.

Updates:

Mac Floppy Emu – is specifically designed for Macintosh. However currently it only support 800K. Very promising project and once they add 1.44MB support I will want to retrofit my Macs with this.

First off it doesn’t do sound… I’ll have to search further for something that will let me do something more.. involved, but for now, this works well enough.

First I’m going to use Qemu 0.14.0 for this, earlier ones will work, but if it’s too old, there isn’t any support for VNC output. I figured I’d start with something simple, Lemmings, from the Win32s demo a while back. Now VNC doesn’t like it when you change resolutions, so I find it’s best to start out in the video mode you plan on recording. So once the VM is fired up I go ahead and load Windows. Qemu can support multiple outputs so I’m going to specify that it listens on the default VNC port (TCP 5900), and bind it to my IPv4 loopback. I’m also going to open up the SDL Window, because I like to see what I’m doing. If you want to get more sophisticated, you can even use a multiplexer program like VNC Reflector which will allow multiple people (or programs) to connect to the VNC port.

Now a minor word about audio.. I am currently having issues aligning this up.. no doubt I’m doing something wrong, or I should just break down and use some proper editing tools but it kind of works for now. Also to get a ‘clean’ capture of the audio from the VM, I use Virtual Audio Cable. By simply changing my default sound device to a VAC, and my default Mic to the same VAC I don’t have to worry about background noises, or anything else. Not to mention in Vista or Windows 7, you can mute other programs so you won’t have instant pestering bleeding into it.

I’m using the awesome program vnc2flv to record this. Now it is a python program, but thankfully us windows users don’t have to go through too much hell to run this, I just downloaded it from ‘RT’s Free Software‘.

I just kick it off like this:

flvrec -C 640×480+0+0 -o video.flv 127.0.0.1:0

And it’ll start recording. I then kicked off sox to record the audio like this:

sox -4 -b 16 -d audio.wav

Then once I’m done doing what I’m going to record, kill both programs.

While sox can record mp3’s if you find libmad, or build it yourself, I found it was just easier to use lame.

lame -r -x -s 44.1 –bitwidth 16 audio.wav

And yes, you *DO* need to output at 44100Hz or 44.1Khz for the audio. Any other level and you can’t combine the flv & audio. Yes I tried and tried, but don’t fight it, and thank me for finding the flags to pass to lame.

Then use flvaddmp3 to combine the audio and the flv video into a final.flv.

flvaddmp3.exe video.flv audio.wav.mp3 final.flv

Now you can upload it to youtube, and from there embed or share it as you wish.

I had originally used pyvnc2swf, which will create a flash file directly, however it doesn’t deal that well with screen refreshes. But if anyone wants to use it, remember the default VNC port is 5900, and you must pick a file to ‘save as’ first then you can start the recording. Also in things like windows, I found having notepad open to full screen then minimizing it was a good way to force a screen redraw.

Download the latest version of flashterm, which will include the flashsocket.php file.

Now the first thing I’d recommend is to extract the flashsocket.php file into it’s own directory, I’ve put mine in the d:\policyserver directory. Next I create a flashsocketpolicyserver.bat file in that directory that contains the following:

c:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.3\php.exe -c php.ini flashsocket.php

Save it, and then we need to provide a php.ini for this server. Just copy the php.ini from c:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.3\php.ini and copy it to your policyserver directory. You will need to edit the ini file to enable php sockets, so un comment this line:

extension=php_sockets.dll

Finally, we need to edit the flashsocket.php file.

alter the following at the top as needed:

$host = “192.168.X.X”; // CHANGE TO HOST IP
$port = 843;

I keep the port the same, as it makes the rest of this.. uncomplicated. I don’t think this binds well to 127.0.0.1 so use the primary IP address on the host that you want to use…

the next thing to look for is the string:

to-ports=\”23\”

This controls which port the flashterm will connect people on. You can also have multiple ports specified like this:

to-ports=\”42315,42323,42424,42525,42626,12323,42222,23333,42332\”

which would allow all of these ports to be accessible to Flashterm… This is the big advantage of the php server version, as it can have multiple ports.

For now though, I’m just going to use the default which will allow connections on the standard telnet port of 23.

And I must say, it’s an excellent way to make older machines more ‘accessible’ to everyone. I know it’s only going to encourage ‘kids’ to get into VAX’s etc, and of course as many are aware, Vista and beyond have removed the telnet client.. (and hyperterm for that matter!!!).

Flashterm, is one of those fancy GCC for flash projects that uses the flash socket API to create a telnet client! Right now they are focused on ANSI emulation geared towards BBS’s. But if you’ve got a firewall to redirect ports, or if you are running the ‘policy’ server directly you can let people into your machine, and all they need is a modern browser/flash combination which you can safely say all ‘kids’ machines will have (and yes even my parents, as they LOVE those silly flash games, and dancing cats).

Anyways, the control key is NOT captured, so there is no control+d to kill your session, but a ‘reload’ of the browser, or closing the tab will do it just as well. Robots doesn’t work correctly, but all & all it’s a super simple way to get back to your machines…

I’ve set one up in the meantime as a test…

http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/telnet

Although I don’t know how long I’ll keep it online. But it does create the possibility now of having not only information on various ancient UNIX but to allow others to use them!.. And for most internet users, with no real downloads as that flash thing is EVERYWHERE…..